I already know how to kill thousands of people. It's not conceptually difficult: more than a day's effort, sure, but what stops people from doing this kind of thing is not the lack of knowing how. https://xkcd.com/1958/

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catigula 5 hours ago | parent [-]

No, you don't. What stops people is actually access to knowledge. There are killers of varying levels of efficacy; making killing easier means more people die. It's 1-1.

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mrguyorama 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How many people have shot up electrical substations, a fairly trivial way to causing widespread harm that was popularized in the news just a few years ago.

But it's only happened a couple times. Because most people just can't be assed to harm a hundred thousand others.

	▲	drdeca 33 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Most people don’t want to hurt lots of other people in an untargeted way, yes. But there are a lot of people, and, apparently a few of them shot up some electrical substations? If you hold constant the (very small) fraction of people who want to cause mass harm, and increase the average ease with which a randomly selected person could cause mass harm , you would expect the amount of deliberate mass harm to increase, even if the fraction of people who would want to do that is like, 0.000001 of people?

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esseph 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> What stops people is actually access to knowledge.

Very untrue.

I'm a combat vet. I spent years fighting an insurgency and therefore pretty good at that very task. I have the knowledge, so what stops me?

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wizzwizz4 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A bold assertion. How many deaths can you attribute to this xkcd comic?

	▲	catigula 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The ideas are dumb. They wouldn't kill anyone, the barrier to entry is too high and you'd trivially be caught and punished.